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Rehashing the Ashes

As your new cricket correspondent I would like to come up with something new on the debacle. The best I can do is to highlight two areas which have in my view attracted insufficient attention: captaincy and support. Over the past 25 years there has been ample evidence of our best cricketers broken [...]

January 6, 2014 // 0 Comments

Another log on the WW1 fire

In my personal view the Blackadder project, which began to be funny with the Elizabethan series 2, really hit its stride with series 3 – set in the Regency period, with Hugh Laurie outstanding as the Prince Regent himself. Before that I had watched it more for the aristocracy of its [...]

January 6, 2014 // 0 Comments

The FA Cup

Sporting fixtures go up and down in prestige and popularity. None more so than the FA Cup. It was once the jewel of the sporting calendar, the last game of the season, and one of a handful of televised games. The proliferation of televised games is a significant reason for its decline. With modern [...]

January 5, 2014 // 0 Comments

Oh What A Lovely War

The first LP I ever bought was the stage recording of the musical Oh What A Lovely War, a Joan Littlewood production of the early sixties. As a little boy, brought up at time when much of the map of the world was coloured pink to reflect The British Empire, I initially thought it was a [...]

January 5, 2014 // 0 Comments

Nordic noir

It’s extraordinary how much Scandinavia has contributed to the crime canon, whether the written book or televised drama. No one has really given a proper explanation and perhaps there is not one. I am just working through the first series of The Bridge, a new one starts tonight. One of the [...]

January 4, 2014 // 0 Comments

Sometimes you couldn’t make it up

Apparently, some 1,058 people – including 40 Brits – have made a shortlist of candidates for a one-way mission to Mars in 2025 being organised by as Dutch organisation called Mars One. It seems that final selections will be the subject of as reality television show process – see [...]

January 3, 2014 // 0 Comments

The Tanner Report

In a game where result and points were all, I was nonetheless pleased that we stuck to our passing game and traditional footballing values, unlike West Ham. Passing was all the more difficult in gusty conditions and if I had a criticism – was this the early Ray Wilkins influence?- we were [...]

January 2, 2014 // 0 Comments

Sherlock – the return

Last night (Wednesday 1st January 2014), one of the biggest television ‘events’ of the entire festive season occurred when the first episode of the new series of Sherlock, the ‘brought up to date’ version of the Conan Doyle detective created by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss – starring [...]

January 2, 2014 // 0 Comments

Happy new year from Melanie Gay

I do not rate New Year’s Eve at all and am happy to spend the evening curled up with a good book. I finally ditched Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness with its extended and tedious description of his family. Enough already. I began the sequel to Morvern Callar by Alan Warner, These [...]

January 1, 2014 // 0 Comments

Ensuring we will remember them …

Tomorrow heralds the beginning of the year in which the world will be commemorating the First World War – originally called ‘The Great War’ – which began for Britain on 4th August 1914. Already the publication-rate of WW1 books, television documentaries and dramas has begun [...]

December 31, 2013 // 0 Comments

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